"...determination is the key to success in politics, in the broadest sense of the word. You don't need many resources to make your voice heard when you are defending a cause you believe to be just..." Padre André Sibomana

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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Howard French Is Right On Rwanda's Paul Kagame.

Our ancestors were wise to note that "the truth crosses the fire without burning." The truth is slowly but surely catching up with Kagame who has built his political legitimacy on pure lies. His record is sinister as this latest gem by the Howard French, a Columbia professor and an-ex journalist with the New York Times shows. The piece has an equally befitting title: The Case Against Rwanda's President Paul Kagame.I will quote a few of the indicative phrases but I urge you to read the piece for a more contextual understanding. You will not be disappointed. "Leading observers say the reevaluation of Kagame and his legacy is long
overdue. Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian scholar whom many consider the
world’s foremost expert on Rwanda, describes Kagame as “probably the
worst war criminal in office today.”

"In an interview, Reyntjens told me
that Kagame’s crimes rank with those perpetrated by former Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein or Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, who is
wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity."

" Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi who was appointed Rwanda’s ambassador to
Washington after serving as an officer in Kagame’s army, puts it
bluntly: “If you differ strongly with Kagame and make your views known
from the inside, you will be made to pay the price, and very often that
price is your life.”

"Kagame tightly controls the country and its citizens through the
Tutsi- dominated Army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the country’s
dominant political party. Throughout Rwanda—in every town and tiny
village—the RPF is present, not unlike the Stasi in East Germany during
the Cold War. While a town may have a Hutu mayor, under Kagame’s system
government officeholders have little authority compared with the RPF
representatives who work in parallel to them and often pull rank."

“The RPF saturates every aspect of life in Rwanda,” said Susan Thomson, a
longtime Rwanda expert at Colgate University. “They know everything: if
you’ve been drinking, if you’ve had an affair, if you’ve paid your
taxes.” Everything is reported on, Thomson says, and there is no appeal."

"Pointing to the origins of the war and its bloody aftermath, Scott
Straus, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, said: “An
honest analysis ... would show that the reasons for what happened were
much more complicated than the idea that the Hutus hate the Tutsis and
want to wipe them out.”

" For one thing, there is abundant evidence that Kagame’s forces in the
early days carried out targeted executions of the Hutu elite, followed
later by much larger extermination campaigns that killed tens of
thousands of people."

"A year after the genocide had ended, blood was still being spilled,
recalls Timothy Longman, then the country director for Human Rights
Watch. “People would take me around and say, ‘There’s mass grave right
over here,’ and you would ask, ‘From when?’ And they would say, ‘Just
from a few weeks ago—not from the genocide,’” says Longman, who now
directs the African Studies Center at Boston University."

" Furthermore, the report estimated that the RPA killed between 15,000 and
30,000 people in just four of its survey areas in the summer of 1994.
Years later a key member of Gersony’s team told me that the real number
of Hutus killed during this period was likely much higher, but that a
low estimate had been published because of fears of a political backlash
within the U.N. so soon after its failure to stop the larger-scale
killing of Tutsis. “What we found was a well-organized military-style
operation, with military command and control, and these were
military-campaign-style mass murders,” the team member told me."

"(In one notorious incident in April 1995, the RPA attacked an internally
displaced people’s camp in Kibeho using automatic weapons, grenades,
and mortars. A team of Australian medics listed more than 4,000 dead
when the RPA forced them to stop counting. France’s leading researcher
on the region, Gérard Prunier, estimates that at least 20,000 more
people from the camp “disappeared” after the massacre.)"

"The case of Victoire Ingabire, a politician from the opposition, was
instructive. When she returned to Rwanda that year, having lived 16
years in exile, to prepare a run for president, her first stop was at
the official genocide memorial. “We are here honoring at this memorial
the Tutsi victims of the genocide. There are also Hutu who were victims
of crimes against humanity and war crimes, not remembered or honored
here,” she said in a prepared statement. “Hutu are also suffering. They
are wondering when their time will come to remember their people. In
order for us to get to that desirable reconciliation, we must be fair
and compassionate towards every Rwandan’s suffering.”

"Ingabire was promptly arrested and
accused of “genocide ideology.” During her trial, President Kagame
publicly declared that she was guilty."

"As early as 1997, the U.N. estimated that Rwandan forces had caused the
deaths of 200,000 Hutus in Congo; Prunier, the French expert, has since
estimated that the toll is closer to 300,000. According to the U.N.
report, these deaths could not be attributed to the hazards of war or to
collateral damage. “The majority of the victims were children, women,
elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no
threat to the attacking forces.” The report concluded that the
systematic and widespread attacks, “if proven before a competent court,
could be characterized as crimes of genocide.”

"Two years ago, Kagame delivered a
lecture in London on “The Challenges of Nation-Building in Africa: The
Case of Rwanda.” When confronted with a U.N. report that was then making
headlines with the suggestion that his forces had committed genocide in
Congo, he dismissed such allegations as “baseless” and “absurd.”
Clearly he was keener to talk about economic indicators and repeat the
oft-told success story of his country."

"But
even that is a truth with modification. Social inequality in Rwanda is
high and rising, experts say. Despite an average annual growth rate of
about 5 percent since 2005, poverty is soaring in the countryside, where
few Western journalists report without official escort."